On Fri, Jun 25, 2004 at 12:08:12PM -0700, Michael J Wenk wrote:
>
> On Fri, Jun 25, 2004 at 06:55:41AM -0700, Rod Roark wrote:
> >
> > We now seem to be at the point where an informed person
> > would have to be certifiably insane to use IE.
>
> I never thought Id see the day where I defend IE, but I don't see your
> statement as being fair. The biggest problem with IE is not its
> buggyness, but its market weight. I did some quick googling for stats
> on this, and found that 95% of the web uses IE. So given that if
> you're attempting to do any broadmarket web development, you're kinda
> stuck developing for IE(unless of course you want to ignore the
> majority of your market) Even narrowing down your markets, you really
> cannot afford to ignore IE, cuz if you do, some customer(or potential
> customer) will suddenly report a problem with it, and then what will
> you do? Say: Sorry sir/ma'am, we do not support IE, the browser that
> comes standard on the most prevalent OS out there?
>
> I would argue that you would have to be certifiably insane to ignore
> IE if you do web development.
Obviously one needs to ensure compatibility with IE when developing, but
it's not necessary to take an IE-only approach. You're probably not
suggesting this, but it's entirely possible to develop for multiple
browsers as long as you stick to code (HTML, CSS, Javascript, etc.) that
is both standards-compliant and has common compatibility among browsers.
This often requires lots of trial-and-error and tweeking (mainly due to
idiosyncracies in IE), but the payoff is maximum visibility. The gap is
closing somewhat in terms of standards compliance, and I understand this
is a primary goal for future versions of IE (so they say ;-). The worst
thing you can do is develop exclusively for IE.
-David
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